--- title: Pentagon Egg-Freezing: If Women Are Drafted, Then What? description: The Pentagon announced a new egg-freezing program just as it considers a draft for women canonical: https://time.com/4207779/egg-freezing-pentagon-army-draft-women/ author: Charlotte Alter article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-02-04T19:51:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T19:07:06.000Z og:title: Pentagon Offers Egg-Freezing, But What If Women Are Drafted? og:description: A reproductive option could soon become a military expectation og:url: https://time.com/4207779/egg-freezing-pentagon-army-draft-women/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Pentagon Offers Egg-Freezing, But What If Women Are Drafted? twitter:description: A reproductive option could soon become a military expectation twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Pentagon Offers Egg-Freezing, But What If Women Are Drafted? > Sponsored content. 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Worth Your Time is TIME's culture recommendation newsletter, edited by culture editor Eliza Berman. Twice a week it surfaces the books, shows, films and ideas TIME's editors think are worth your attention, and explains why. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Does TIME have a culture newsletter? Yes. Worth Your Time is TIME's culture newsletter, published Tuesdays and Saturdays. #### Who writes TIME's culture recommendations? Culture editor Eliza Berman writes Worth Your Time, drawing on TIME's critics and culture desk. #### Is Worth Your Time free? Yes. It is a free newsletter available at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: The Truth About Egg Freezing [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Egg Freezing](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/A1nDxOli.m3u8) (8:41)  _Published 2015-07-16. Vicki Rokhlin, 28, is relying on her 14 frozen eggs to have children. But will they work?_  by [Charlotte Alter](https://time.com/author/charlotte-alter/)  ## Charlotte Alter Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 13, 2023 7:07 PM UTCPublished: Feb 4, 2016 7:51 PM UTC  by [Charlotte Alter](https://time.com/author/charlotte-alter/)  ## Charlotte Alter Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 13, 2023 7:07 PM UTCPublished: Feb 4, 2016 7:51 PM UTC Right now, egg-freezing is an option for rich professional women, but it soon could become commonplace for female soldiers. Amid an ongoing discussion over whether women should register for the military draft, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has announced a $150 [million pilot program](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/us/politics/pentagon-to-offer-plan-to-store-eggs-and-sperm-to-retain-young-troops.html) to cover sperm and egg-freezing for active duty troops. The program was mentioned in a speech last week along with several other initiatives to make it easier for troops to have families, presumably in order to attract more millennials into military service and retain talented female soldiers. Many of the [proposals are excellent](http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/647907/soldier-filled-with-gratitude-at-new-family-policies), including extending paid maternity leave, extending subsidized childcare, and allowing service members to stay at their station for family reasons. And it makes total sense to extend the option of freezing their eggs or sperm to service members who are facing potentially debilitating injuries. “For us, this is a suite of benefits to make military lives more family friendly,” said Brad Carson, Acting Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “Irrespective of how one comes into the force, it’s about making military life more compatible with family life.” The draft isn’t a reality yet, but the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Marine Corps commandant [have both testified that they think it should happen](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/02/02/army-and-marine-corps-chiefs-its-time-for-women-to-register-for-the-draft/). Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said in Wednesday night’s [Democratic town hall](http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/03/politics/democratic-town-hall-transcript/) that she’d “have to think about whether I think it’s necessary,” but she sounded open to the idea. And now that women soldiers have won the long fight to be [considered for combat positions, ](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/us/politics/combat-military-women-ash-carter.html)registering for the draft seems like a logical next step. Carson called a draft a “far flung contingency,” and such a remote possibility that it’s “not at the forefront of anyone’s mind.” Taken separately, each of these moves makes perfect sense. But when taken together, they raise troubling questions about the military’s role in fertility choices for a generation of women facing compulsory military service. Will egg-freezing transform from a rare reproductive option into a military expectation? [**Read More:** The Truth About Freezing Your Eggs](http://time.com/3960528/the-truth-about-freezing-your-eggs/) If so, that’s a huge problem. [Because despite the marketing hype touting egg-freezing as an “insurance policy,” there’s very little research to prove how well it actually works](http://time.com/3960528/the-truth-about-freezing-your-eggs/). The procedure is so new that the vast majority of women who have frozen their eggs haven’t gone back to thaw them and attempt a pregnancy, so it’s almost impossible to know how many babies will actually be born, and whether they’ll have any genetic or developmental problems. The most comprehensive numbers to date, assembled by former chairman of the Society of Assisted Reproduction registry Dr. Kevin Doody exclusively for TIME, paint a clearer picture. More than 6,000 egg-freezing cycles were completed in 2014\. But of the 718 thaw cycles that year, 162 resulted in a live birth. That’s a success rate of just over 22%. Because the procedure is so new and so expensive, most of the women who have already frozen their eggs are older, which affects the viability of their eggs. So the current numbers reflect the live birth rates for eggs that were mostly frozen by mothers in their mid-to-late thirties. And since the risk of chromosomal abnormality increases with age, live birth rates are lower for older eggs. So live birth rates for twenty-something soldiers may be slightly higher than 22%. But even with youthful eggs, freezing doesn’t work all the time. It doesn’t even work _most_ of the time. That’s because egg-freezing only works as well as in vitro fertilization (IVF), and IVF is hardly foolproof. In women under 35, IVF has around a 40% success rate—by 42, that success rate drops below 5%. The appeal of egg-freezing is that women would theoretically be able to preserve their IVF success rate for the age at which they froze their eggs (so a 39 year old could attempt an IVF pregnancy with her own 29-year old eggs) but even in the best-case scenario with the youngest, healthiest eggs, the odds are not in her favor. “There’s a demand for this from women in the forces, so we’re saying ‘we’re going to make life better for you,’” Carson said, noting that the military wanted to be “as progressive an employer as there is in the entire country.” Tech companies like Apple and Facebook offer egg freezing to employees. If a civilian woman decides to take a calculated risk on her fertility because of her own life trajectory, that’s her prerogative, and more power to her. The same goes for women in the military who have made the choice to serve. But drafting women into the military and then giving them the “option” to freeze their eggs is another thing altogether. It raises questions about whether compulsory military service could pressure American women to put their fertility on hold using an invasive and ultimately risky procedure. And too often, “options,” especially when presented by an institution as powerful as the American military, can quickly turn into expectations. Think about it: in a wartime scenario, would a female soldier truly feel that she had the option to step away from the Army to have children on a natural timeline? Or would she feel a patriotic duty to take the military up on its offer, freezing her eggs and artificially delaying her chance to have a family? If so, she’d be getting a raw deal. Of course, men who serve in the military also risk their chance to have a family, whether by death or by injury—but they’re not on the same fertility timeline as women soldiers. Male veterans who leave the military in their mid-to-late thirties would still have plenty of time to have kids, women veterans would not. The Pentagon’s egg-freezing plan sounds like a fair, high-minded solution to this tough problem. If only it worked better. ## Transcript I liken it to the feeling when my friends get engaged and they're so excited that they just solved this huge mystery in their life, and I'm happy for them. But, when I went through it and when I froze my eggs, I realized that I I've done this for myself. There was no man swooping in to fill in this puzzle piece. That was really empowering to know that I took fate into my own hands, and have changed the path of my life, because I wanted to, and I could. [ MUSIC ] I have a lot of these dreams that I wanna live out on my timeline. A lot of those dreams include long spans of international travel. I wanna write a novel. At one point, I'd love to be a TED talker. And so I was at my gynecologist office and she was so supportive when I was telling her about my dreams. And I was having a lot of anxiety How I was going to fulfill all these dreams before 32, 33, 34. And so we started talking about egg freezing. I kind of brought it up to her as a joke. And she said, you know, you should really think about this. And so she referred me to a doctor. We've seen a transformation in the type of patient who comes in for elective egg freezing. Six or seven years ago, it was often a woman who was experiencing concerns over her reproductive potential, Many of them already had diminished ovarian reserve. We could fast forward that today, where the woman are coming in. They're 35 years old, very frequently. The buzz is in the air at the company that Women her age, in her situation, are taking charge of their fertility, are coming in and freezing their eggs. So the culture has changed dramatically. [ MUSIC ] So I'll show you what we're basically trying to do is replace the water in the cell with a sugar- based cryoprotectant solution so that there are no ice crystals. Ice crystals cause damage to cell membranes [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay. Now I'm going to load the eggs onto the cryo device. All right, and then they get plunged into the liquid nitrogen. So this is the liquid nitrogen tank. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] This one here [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ INAUDIBLE ] That's it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We've been fortunate enough to have dozens of women achieve a healthy pregnancy after using their thawed eggs. Recent reports in the literature suggests that over 10, 000 healthy babies have now been born from egg freezing technology. But some of those numbers that you just mentioned. Those are often just any births from a frozen egg. They don't necessarily distinguish between whether the egg was frozen by a donor or by a mother herself. Do you have any data about The number of babies that have been born from the mother's own frozen egg here at this clinic. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So reports suggest that we've had over 10, 000 babies nationally and internationally from frozen eggs. But I know a lot of those babies aren't necessarily from women who have electively frozen their eggs for social reasons, many of them are from donor eggs. There is a difference from taking a 22 year old frozen egg and taking a 35 or 40 year old woman's egg. and someday thawing and fertilizing and transferring. So we have to be really careful about how we council patients. I know that many of the patients who freeze their eggs here are going to be able to someday have a healthy baby, but it won't be everybody. That's why it's not an insurance policy. It's just an opportunity to take some control over something we've really never had control of before. The truth about egg freezing is it's a relatively new procedure. It was just declassified as being experimental about a little over a year ago. So for that reason, there is not this large, comprehensive data pool of the number of eggs frozen, and then thawed, that have become babies. The vast majority of eggs that have been frozen have not been retrieved yet. So women have to understand that there are no numbers for them to call from when they are looking for will this work me. Because I'm 28 and my fertility is the best that it will ever get, I was able to do everything in one round. And I didn't understand the power of that until I woke up in the hospital right after surgery next to a 34 year old woman and she told me this was her third time trying this year, that's putting your body through three rounds of hormone injections, three surgeries And it's three times as expensive. And so the moment that really validated it for me was when this 34 year- old woman who had done 3 rounds in a year turned to me and said, wow. I wish someone had told me to do this at 28 cuz I would have. Some physicians and some marketing fertility arms do push women to freeze their eggs when they're at a very young age. Other clinics prefer that women wait until age 30 because what they've found is that the younger you are when you freeze, the less likely you are to need the eggs later on. However, as with most things in life, this is a double- edged sword. The younger you are, the better the quality of your eggs is going to be. Decreasing fertility starts during the time a woman is in her late puberty and goes throughout her life. Even when a woman is still getting her period in her late forties or even early fifties, it doesn't mean she's making normal eggs and that they're gonna be able to end up with healthy babies from that. It's not the success rate. It's the success rate for women like you. Are you 29? Are you 39? Are you 33? How are your tubes? Or do you have endometriosis? What's your hormonal health like? What's your body mass index? There are a huge number of varietal. That will determine conception success, whether it's natural or medically enhanced. Before I did all the research, I thought egg freezing was easy. And then I started reading blogs. And I started to get a sense of like whoa, your body goes through a lot. You're essentially forcing yourself to go into pregnancy mode in two weeks instead of nine months. I mean my estrogen shot up from 61 to 1900, I felt crazy. And I wasn't really prepared for that. Most of the women that have reached out to me The overall theme is, thank you for bringing awareness to the gravity of how much you put your body through, how much time this takes, how different your life is. Women shouldn't take this lightly, it's a big financial consideration, it's a big health consideration. It's a month of your life that you're sitting at home, you're not dating, you're not drinking, you're not smoking, you're not partying, you're not traveling. That was really hard for me Me. I mean I was up every morning at 7 AM to get an ultrasound, and a blood test. [ MUSIC ] I think there's no guarantee in life, right? No guarantee that I could have a child naturally, and there's no guarantee that one of these implanted embryos will stick. So, all that I can do is Is give my kids the best shot of a healthy future as possible. [ MUSIC ] Egg freezing is an amazing Oppurtunity but it is not. Absoutely not. An ironclad insurance policy. Know that going in. Hedging your bets is always a good idea in life. And you've got about $ 17000 in your back pocket that you're not gonna notice if it goes away Consider egg freezing. 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